This chapter delineates several distinct (and often problematically conflated) kinds of sexual exclusion: (1) lack of access to sexual gratification or pleasure, (2) lack of access to partnered sex, and (3) lack of social/psychological validation that comes from being seen as a sexual being. Liberman offers proposals about what our collective responses to these harms should be while weighing in on debates about whether there are rights to various kinds of sexual goods. She concludes that we ought to provide (...) mechanical assistance to those who are incapable of self-stimulation, enhance access to sexual education for everyone, and engage in a systematic effort to change the harmful social norms, stereotypes, and cultural ideals that drive exclusion from partnered sex and can lead to social invalidation. (shrink)

I answer two questions: (1) what are people doing when they exchange conventional wedding vows? and (2) under what circumstances are these things morally and rationally permissible to do? I propose that wedding pledges are public proclamations that are simultaneously both private vows and interpersonal promises, and that they are often subject to uncertainty. I argue that the permissibility of uncertain wedding promises depends on whether the uncertainty stems from doubts about one’s own internal weakness of will and susceptibility to (...) temptation or from the expectation that external circumstances might change. I then explain why uncertainty is a prima facie challenge for unconditional wedding vows, and I offer a solution: rational wedding vows are unconditional in their content but implicitly conditional in their structure; the spouse pledges to act in certain ways unconditionally, so long as they remain in the spousal role. I respond to objections to my view (including Elizabeth Brake’s claim that the permissibility of unilateral divorce undermines an understanding of wedding vows as promises), and conclude with some suggestions about what marrying couples should do to ensure permissible pledges. (shrink)

This chapter takes an indirect approach to the question of how people weigh conflicting reasons to determine what they ought to do. It is argued that obligations are a distinct normative concept that also admits of weighing. A natural, simple way due to W. D. Ross—Simple Weighing—of construing the manner in which both reasons and obligations are weighed is introduced. Commitments are introduced as a third normative concept that admits of weighing, and it is argued that Simple Weighing is inadequate (...) for commitments. Commitments, it is argued, are actually a special case of self-imposed obligations; it follows that obligations in general need a more sophisticated weighing process than it first appears. The payoff for our understanding of the weight of reasons is a challenge: if Ross was wrong about how obligations weigh, could Simple Weighing also be wrong about how reasons weigh? (shrink)

Samson Liberman ABSTRACT: The aim of this paper is a socio-philosophical analysis of attention deficit phenomenon, which is being detected at the intersection of several subject areas. The main methodological instrument of the study is a Marxist principle of alienation. Alienation of attention, which, on the one hand, is being ….

A phenomenological inquiry into the benefits and limitations of formal analytic reasoning is developed in reliance upon the criticism of reason by Husserl and his students, which is respecified ethnomethodologically by examining occasions of philosophers' work in its actual course. Liberman engages in a dialogue and debate with Husserl, Heidegger, Levinas, Merleau-Ponty, and Derrida for the purpose of adding an ethnomethodological vision of the orderliness of ordinary philosophical affairs to the philosophical anthropology of reason.

Most theories of promising are insufficiently broad, for they ground promissory obligation in some external or contingent feature of the promise. In this paper, I introduce a new kind of theory. The Mental States First (MSF) theory grounds promissory obligation in something internal and essential: the mental state expressed by promising, or the state that promisors purport to be in. My defense of MSF relies on three claims. First, promising to Φ expresses that you have resolved to Φ. Second, resolving (...) to Φ commits you to Φing, all else being equal. Third, the norms on speech acts are determined by the norms on the mental states they express, such that publicly expressing that you are in a state subjects you to whatever commitments are normally incurred by being in that state, regardless of whether you really are in it. I suggest that this general approach might also explain how the norms on other sorts of speech acts work. (shrink)

Phenomenological analyses of the orderliness of naturally occurring collaboration.

An accompanying website offers a set of interactive debate tutorials, which include photographs of debates; a guide to the participants; a grammar of Tibetan debating, which includes sample propositions, responses, and strategies; the ethnomethods employed by debaters; videos of illustrative debates, complete with English translations, all analyzed in detail in the book; and an appendix comprising an interactive debate, glossary, manual, and illustrations. Please see www.thdl.org/DebateTutorials/ for this material. -- back cover.

I assess the ways in which popular narratives about protests against police brutality in the summer of 2020 are ethically and epistemically problematic. I argue that many news outlets have pushed a false and misleading narrative that frames the protests as inherently violent and dangerous when in fact they were primarily non-violent. I analyze the ways in which these narratives are likely to increase epistemic injustice, including testimonial injustice against protestors. I then introduce a new framework that I call ignorance (...) bolstering, which is a form of epistemic injustice in which the privileged majority becomes entrenched in their their ignorance of nature of the protests and the racial injustices that sparked them. In particular, I analyze how words like "riot", "violence", "antifa", and "peaceful" are popularly misused to further entrench this ignorance. (shrink)

I outline four conditions on permissible promise-making: the promise must be for a morally permissible end, must not be deceptive, must be in good faith, and must involve a realistic assessment of oneself. I then address whether promises that you are uncertain you can keep can meet these four criteria, with a focus on campaign promises as an illustrative example. I argue that uncertain promises can meet the first two criteria, but that whether they can meet the second two depends (...) on the source of the promisor's uncertainty. External uncertainty stemming from outside factors is unproblematic, but internal uncertainty stemming from the promisor's doubts about her own strength leads to promises that are in bad faith or unrealistic. I conclude that campaign promises are often subject to internal uncertainty and are therefore morally impermissible to make, all else being equal. (shrink)

Ṿe-śamaḥta be-khol ha-ṭov -- Ṿe-zakharta et kol ha-derekh.

The sichos compiled in this volume were given, over the years, by Rav Nebenzahl, Rav of the Old City of Jerusalem, between Rosh HaShanah and Yom Kippur.

Two seminal notions of Harold Garfinkel have endured despite some uncertainty and indeterminacy that accompany them: “autochthonous” and “tendentious”. These terms, which respect the dynamic and evolving nature of social interaction, describe how local parties discover, come upon, or develop coherent accounts that can assist them to lay hold of a local orderliness that is governing some mundane interaction. This paper illuminates these two notions, first theoretically and then empirically. Drawing upon the reflections of Garfinkel, Sacks, Schegloff, Mead, Husserl, Schutz, (...) Gurwitsch, and others, the radical consequences of these two notions are elucidated and then applied to two perspicuous conversations where it is possible to witness autochthony and tendentiousness in action. This provides a clearer understanding of the importance that these features of social interaction can play in our everyday lives. The two illustrations reveal occasions where a local orderliness appears on its own, autochthonously, without requiring a heavy dose of deliberate conceptual control by parties. (shrink)

I explore the debate about whether consequentialist theories can adequately accommodate the moral force of promissory obligation. I outline a straightforward act consequentialist account grounded in the value of satisfying expectations, and raise and assess three objections to this account: that it counterintuitively predicts that certain promises should be broken when commonsense morality insists that they should be kept, that the account is circular, and Michael Cholbi’s argument that this account problematically implies that promise-making is frequently obligatory. I then discuss (...) alternative act consequentialist accounts, including Philip Pettit’s suggestion that promise-keeping is an intrinsic good and Michael Smith’s agent-relative account. I outline Brad Hooker’s rule consequentialist account of promissory obligation and raise a challenge for it. I conclude that appeals to intuitions about cases will not settle the dispute, and that consequentialists and their critics must instead engage in substantive debate about the nature and stringency of promissory obligation. (shrink)

Larry Temkin draws on the work of Angus Deaton to argue that countries with poor governance sometimes rely on charitable giving and foreign aid in ways that enable them to avoid relying on their own citizens; this can cause them to be unresponsive to their citizens’ needs and thus prevent the long-term alleviation of poverty and other social problems. I argue that the implications of this “lack of government responsiveness argument” (or LOGRA) are both broader and narrower than they might (...) first appear. I explore how LOGRA applies more broadly to certain types of charitable giving in developed countries, with a focus on medical crowdfunding. I then highlight how LOGRA does not apply to charitable giving aimed at alleviating the suffering of the absolutely politically marginalized, or those especially vulnerable people to whom governments are never responsive. (shrink)

While many Christians accept the claim that giving to support the poor and needy is a core moral and religious obligation, most Christian giving is usually not very efficient in EA terms. In this paper, I explore possibilities for productive collaboration between effective altruists and Christian givers. I argue that Christians are obligated from their own perspective to give radically in terms of quantity and scope to alleviate the suffering of the poor and needy. I raise two important potential stumbling (...) blocks for EAChristian collaboration. First, Christians cannot assess outcomes using a straightforward utilitarian calculus of the sort preferred by many EAs, lest they run into a reductio. Second, Christians will want to give to support aims such as worship and evangelism that are not shared by secular EAs and that are not easily commensurable, making the allocation of giving resources more difficult. I conclude with some tentative suggestions about how Christians who are sympathetic to EA might become more effective in their giving. (shrink)

What phenomenological details can investigations by human scientists provide to classical phenomenological inquiries regarding sense-constitution, the reflexivity of mundane understanding, and the production of objective knowledge? Problems of constitutional phenomenology are summarized and specifications are provided regarding ways to study intersubjective events. After a review of some quandaries suggested by an examination of Husserl, Levinas, Merleau-Ponty, Schutz, Gurwitsch, Garfinkel, and Adorno, the author provides two demonstrations of social phenomenologically inspired human studies—the playing of games with rules and the objective determination (...) of flavors by coffee tasters—in order to identify and describe some of the local details of sense organization that the human sciences can provide to phenomenological researchers. (shrink)

"Explores the history, architecture, and furnishings of the thirteen magnificent governors' mansions of the American South. Emphasizing the mansions themselves, Ann Liberman describes each building's architectural history, including renovations, in lightof the history of each state. Alise O'Brien's lavish color photographs illuminate the interiors and exteriors of the mansions"--Provided by publisher.

I argue that it can sometimes be good to do philosophy badly and that this has important implications for our classroom practices. It is better to engage in philosophy in a mediocre way than to not engage with it at all, and this should influence what learning goals we adopt and how we assess students. Furthermore, being open to doing and teaching philosophy imperfectly is necessary for fighting against rampant prestige bias and perfectionism in our discipline and our classrooms; if (...) we are to expand the canon and diversify our curricula, we must be willing to risk doing mediocre work ourselves and willing to support our students in doing the same. I conclude that we should sometimes be guided in our teaching by an alternative standard of philosophical excellence that is focused not on the quality of the work produced, but on the joy, creativity, and collaboration involved in the process. (shrink)

In recent years, scientists have increasingly taken to investigate the predictive nature of cognition. We argue that prediction relies on abstraction, and thus theories of predictive cognition need an explicit theory of abstract representation. We propose such a theory of the abstract representational capacities that allow humans to transcend the “here-and-now.” Consistent with the predictive cognition literature, we suggest that the representational substrates of the mind are built as ahierarchy, ranging from the concrete to the abstract; however, we argue that (...) there are qualitative differences between elements along this hierarchy, generating meaningful, often unacknowledged,diversity.Echoing views from philosophy, we suggest that the representational hierarchy can be parsed into:modality-specificrepresentations, instantiated on perceptual similarity;multimodalrepresentations, instantiated primarily on the discovery of spatiotemporal contiguity; andcategoricalrepresentations, instantiated primarily on social interaction. These elements serve as the building blocks ofcomplex structures discussed in cognitive psychology (e.g., episodes, scripts) and are the inputs for mental representations that behave like functions, typically discussed in linguistics (i.e.,predicators). We support our argument for representational diversity by explaining how the elements in our ontology are all required to account for humans’ predictive cognition (e.g., in subserving logic-based prediction; in optimizing the trade-off between accurate and detailed predictions) and by examining how the neuroscientific evidence coheres with our account. In doing so, we provide a testable model of the neural bases of conceptual cognition and highlight several important implications to research on self-projection, reinforcement learning, and predictive-processing models of psychopathology. (shrink)

In Willing, Wanting, Waiting, Richard Holton lays out a detailed account of resolutions, arguing that they enable agents to resist temptation. Holton claims that temptation often leads to inappropriate shifts in judgment, and that resolutions are a special kind of first- and second-order intention pair that blocks such judgment shift. In this paper, I elaborate upon an intuitive but underdeveloped objection to Holton’s view – namely, that his view does not enable agents to successfully block the transmission of temptation in (...) the way that he claims, because the second-order intention is as equally susceptible to temptation as the first-order intention alone would be. I appeal to independently compelling principles – principles that Holton should accept, because they help fill an important explanatory gap in his account – to demonstrate why this objection succeeds. This argument both shows us where Holton’s view goes wrong and points us to the kind of solu-tion we need. In conclusion, I sketch an alternative account of resolutions as a first-order intention paired with a second-order desire. I argue that my account is not susceptible to the same objection because a temptation that cannot be blocked by an intention can be blocked by a desire. (shrink)

Tomasello provides compelling evidence that children understand that people are morally obligated toward members of their social group. We call for expanding the scope of inquiry to encompass the full developmental trajectory of humans’ understanding of the relation between moral obligation, sociality, and stancetaking in interaction. We suggest that humans display a lifelong preoccupation with the sociality of moral obligation.